India Has A Fast-Growing Economy That Is Not Creating Enough Jobs

After being elected back in 2014, Narendra Modi managed to considerably grow India’s economy, but not the number of jobs

Prime minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) promised to grow the economy and create millions of jobs for young people, vowing to reverse a decade of “jobless growth” under the previous government. To this day, they did manage to grow the economy, India’s gross domestic product being estimated to be about $1 trillion bigger this year than it was in 2014. However, regarding the second part of the promise, India has not released official employment data for several years now – saying a lot about the promised increase of jobs.

The country is today among the top world’s largest economies and according to data from the International Monetary Fund it is about to outrun the United Kingdom for the fifth spot in 2019. But the prime minister is now running for a second term and together with its BJP party he wants to make India the world’s third largest economy by 2030.

The aim is to boost the GDP to $5 trillion by 2025 from $2.9 trillion projected for this year, and if that is a success, India will overthrow Germany and become the fourth biggest economy in the world. Moreover, if all goes according to plan, the GDP should then rise to $10 trillion by 2032, being surpassed only by the US and China.

On the other hand, India needs to create more than 10 million jobs every year in order to keep pace with the growth in its working age population. Independent calculations such as the ones made by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy says India lost 11 million jobs in 2018, while another study from last year made by India’s Azim Premji University showed that rapid economic growth is producing far fewer jobs than it used to.

Now on the verge of new elections, Modi seems to be the front-runner to winning, but people are starting to questions his economic promises so it can go either way.